Bitcoin's Anonymous $55 Million Pineapple Fund Gives Final Donation

It’s a story straight out of cinematic lines: whale cryptocurrency investor rakes in mounds of money, and reaching a “satiety point” decides to give a healthy portion of it to worthy charities. And add to that the spectre of remaining anonymous, the ecosystem, beset by dreams of easy fortunes and Lambos and glory, was given a real-world object lesson in five short months. Health care, water potability, education, digital rights advocates, among many others, all felt the power and generosity of crypto. This week, Pineapple Fund announced its final donation.

Pineapple Fund Issues its Final Donation

In a subreddit post this week, Pineapple Fund’s anonymous benefactor wrote, “It’s been five months, and having just made my last PF donation to the Internet Archive, I figure it might be a good time to say farewell.” Pine, as the anonymous poster goes by, continued by thanking the broader community for offering worthy organization suggestions, and also thanked “the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community, for turning a Sourceforge project into a $0.5T industry.”

The fund burst upon the crypto community mid-December of last year, right at the height of bitcoin core’s (BTC) price spike. “The anonymous donor says he saw the promise of bitcoin long before it broke the single-digit price range. The donor explains the ‘shattering returns’ of bitcoin over the years has given him more money than he can spend,” these pages documented at the time.

Donations ranged between $50,000 to $5,000,000. Around since the mid 1980s, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) researches and educates about “the medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana.” It was one of the organizations deemed worthy of a $5mil gift from the fund.

Give Directly, a group facilitating the ability to send money directly to the extreme poor, also landed among $5mil donations. It claims to distribute 88 percent of each dollar to those in need. Roughly $1,000 is sent to well vetted recipients who often use what is the equivalent in about a year’s wages for essential housing materials.

A Strong Legacy

The final recipient of $5mil was the Open Medicine Foundation (OMF). Its goal is to both fund and initiate collaborative and groundbreaking research into chronic complex diseases, focusing upon the End ME/CFS Project, designed to find biomarkers and effective treatments for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

“I kind of miss the old times when bitcoin was a small community,” Pine wrote, “and you could count the number of ‘altcoins’ with one hand. Finding someone else who even knows about bitcoin was incredibly rare, and exchanges were semi-automated or running on PHP.”

Community response was effusive with praise such as, “Thank you for doing what so many wish they would do in your position but yet fail to when they get there. Really proud of you and appreciative of your generosity,” one commenter wrote. Still another insisted, “This kind of generosity will indirectly impact so many peoples’ lives for the better. Thank you!”

Other commenters held onto the idea of Pine returning at some point should the market tick back up again, and prices moon. “Thanks for following along with this experiment. I’m going to say goodbye now, but maybe there’s room for dessert in a few years,” Pine teased. “If you’re ever blessed with crypto fortune, consider supporting what you aspire our world to be. :)” Of course, others are currently involved in charitable, real-world work, such as Eat BCH. The group doesn’t enjoy the financing of a whale, and yet it provides food relief for countries such as Venezuela, which has suffered greatly in a giant economic downturn.

Is charity an important way to promote crypto? Let us know in the comments section below.

On May 21, 2019, a press release was sent to a variety of publications that said Craig Wright was granted… read more.

C. Edward Kelso

C. Edward Kelso has written hundreds of articles as a journalist covering a range of topics from international finance, regulation, to cryptocurrency philosophy, interviews with luminaries, and book reviews.

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